Sites

In 1998 I went through Basic Combat Training for the United States Army. It was 9 weeks of grueling, awesome and exhausting training. It was training that definitely pushed the limits of your body and mind. I learned quite a lot and the training forever shaped the person I am today.

Next week, I will have the opportunity to go to Boot Camp again, but this time it will be for .NET development. JP Boodhoo, a great guy who I met at Alt.NET, conducts a course known as Nothin' But .NET Developer Boot Camp. This training is expected to physically and mentally wear you out, stretching your mind (and the CLR) to the limits. JP even mentioned as much himself:

My use of the term bootcamp is not a marketing pitch. You WILL:

be exhausted at the end of the day

spend no less that 14 hours in a course day

have your longest days on Thursday and Friday (historically, 20 – 24 hours is not uncommon)

Why would I want to go back to boot camp? The benefits of this kind of training speak for themselves on the course overview.

Have a look. I'll wait. Just looking at the sheer amount of topics covered blows my mind. Many of these topics I have a good understanding on already, but getting the fundamentals down is an important way to move forward. Plus there are many things I hope to learn next week!

And when you have finished the course you should have a grasp on these concepts:

Interface Based Programming

Design By Contract

Behaviour Driven Development

Layered Architecture

Object Oriented Programming

Design Patterns

Unit Testing

Interaction vs. State Based Testing

Dependency Injection

Object Relational Mapping

Domain Driven Design

Build Automation

Judging what I have heard from others, this is one of the best courses you can take for .NET development out there. I will definitely let you know AFTER next week how it goes (I will most likely be too tired during the training).